Quick Guide to Making Thousands on Digital Products

a complete guide from start to finish

Grace Lemire

May 21, 2024

Hey.

Today’s issue is a goldmine, if I don’t say so myself. We’re diving into all things digital products.

In today’s newsletter:

Why you should sell digital products
How to find a winning idea
How to create a funnel that sells your product in the background
A few updates on the world of social media

Why You Should Sell Digital Products

There’s a few main reasons digital products are powerful for creators:

You don’t have to worry about maintaining inventory or shipping physical products.
You create it once, then profit on it forever.
It’s passive income. If you have a funnel that works, people will buy in the background. It’s minimal effort to maintain.
There are creators making $360k per month from their digital products, as reported by Stan. Simply put, it’s crazy not to want a piece of that.

How to Figure Out What to Sell

There’s a couple ways to find a winning product:

Look at what people ask you for.
Use AI to generate ideas.

💡 The product you want to sell isn’t always the one your audience will buy.

For example, I know a creator that published a product that seemed intuitive to sell. People bought it, but nothing crazy happened.

They kept getting the same question over and over. It seemed easy to answer, but they released a product that answered that very simple question anyways. People buy it like crazy, generating tens of thousands in revenue each month.

Remember that what’s second nature to you might not be to others. And even if something is Google-able, people still want the fast track option.

Here’s a few examples:

You release a budget template, but everyone keeps asking you about how to redeem their credit card points. They don’t know which buttons to click. It seems simple to you, but it clearly isn’t to others. ➡️ Release a quick guide to CC point redemption, or a mini course on how to earn and redeem points.
You’ve grown as a Twitch streamer. People always ask how you did it. You feel like you don’t have much to share, but you’re always able to answer people’s questions about it. ➡️ Release a course on how to start, grow, and monetize a Twitch platform for aspiring creators.
You share your workouts on your page openly. They’re there for free. But people keep asking about your routines. Why make a paid product? ➡️ Release an 8-week workout plan compiling your workouts in one easy-to-use guide.

💡 AI can generate ideas based off your platform.

Grab the link to your primary platform, then head to Gemini. Ask it to “generate digital product ideas for this content creator [link to profile].”

Alternatively, you can describe the type of content you talk about or a specific pillar of content, then ask it to generate ideas based on that.

I did this for a personal growth experiment I’ve been doing, and it gave me 9 ideas that are actually pretty solid.

How to Build a Funnel and Generate More Sales

We could write a novel about this (and let us know if you’d like us to dive deeper), but we’ll keep it high-level for now.

Create a Funnel That Works

Quick marketing lesson.

For many digital products, your content serves as a top-of-the-funnel piece. It attracts people into your ecosystem.

But many creators forget to ever bring these folks down the funnel toward a conversion.

Source: Metranomic

Looking at the Evaluation section, there are 3 strategies creators can implement well: free tools, webinars, and newsletters*.

In combination with a powerful DM automation tool like ManyChat, this is what the customer journey ends up looking like:

1️⃣ Person watches your Reel on debt payoff tips ➡️ You prompt them to comment “money” for a free template. ManyChat automates sending them the link. You capture their email here. ➡️ A few days later, you promote your paid financial reset program that helps people go from overwhelmed by their finances to confident in their strategy.

2️⃣ Person watches your post on how much you make as a creator ➡️ You prompt them to comment “creator” to get access to a free webinar where you share how you became a creator. ManyChat automates this. ➡️ The end of the webinar pitches your paid course on how to monetize as a creator.

3️⃣ You’re a sports creator. You post a YouTube video making commentary on the latest sports news. ➡️ You prompt people to sign up for your free newsletter. Link it in the description. ➡️ Within your free newsletter, you promote your paid Fantasy Sports Cheat Sheets & Draft Guide.

*Let us know if you’d like us to dive into monetizing with a newsletter. Some folks earn $9k all the way up to $100k/mo with their newsletters.

Quick Strategies to Generate More Sales

Again, this could also be a novel, but we’ll keep it to-the-point. You’ll generate more sales when you do these 3 things:

Post about your offer. The Rule of 7 is a marketing principle that says people need to see something 7 times before they buy it.

Most people post once or twice and think posting more is overbearing. It isn’t. You have to share your offer for people to know it exists and remember to buy it.

Create FOMO. When you promote your offers, share how many people have bought it, or who is buying it (you can blur their names out).

This looks like sharing a screenshot from the product with text saying “omg can’t believe 1,000 of you have bought this!!” or putting “over 250 people use this product daily” or “have used this product to do XYZ.”

This makes people think, “If all these people are buying it, they must think it’s worth it.” and “I want to be part of that.”

Add an element of exclusivity where you can. There’s several ways you can go about this. It could be:
- A private community for everyone that buys the product
- Exclusive access to a monthly group Zoom call with you
- An exclusive resource you don’t sell individually
- Only accepting a certain number of people during a certain timeframe (ie. 20 students per month for a course)

People want to feel like they’re part of something exclusive. The key is keeping these bonuses exclusive to people who buy the product and not opening them up outside of that.